


all the rust expires

by atrocalopteryx



Category: Bleach
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-15
Updated: 2014-05-15
Packaged: 2018-01-24 22:43:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1619633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atrocalopteryx/pseuds/atrocalopteryx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Thought I was already dead,” Gin says.</p><p>“Death can be subjective,” Ohtoribashi replies. “But it does depend on how long you can hold your breath.”</p><p>(Gin isn't all dead and Izuru isn't all finished with him.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	all the rust expires

**Author's Note:**

> Specific warnings for manual asphyxiation, gory/violent imagery, hollows, creepy shit.

There’s a ruin somewhere dead and dark and Gin is sitting in the middle of it where the light doesn’t reach. He tripped over broken bits of stone on the path, which coiled and slid and was the only one he found near the half-falling arch he woke up underneath, if woke up is what he did. Everything smells like metal and the gates look like horns.

He’s probably dead. He’s definitely dead, but he has a feeling that he died some time ago and hasn’t finished the journey yet, hasn’t shed all his skin. The dust has rubbed him raw.

This place looks like something he felt once, a long time ago, something that has since slipped through the cracks. It’s an old, crumbling arena and what looks like a row of trees along the horizon, black and brittle, in sets of ten. There’s nothing else to see and nothing to hear except for a low, metallic humming that sounds like it’s coming from something big. Gin doesn’t know if that’s real or if it’s what happens when you’ve been lying around dead for a while. Maybe he hit his head on something when he got here.

It doesn’t really seem like reincarnation. It could be purgatory, if the point of this place is for him to wander round it until his feet are bloody and his soul is made into something different with all the _bad_ stuff lying in the dirt underneath him. Most likely it’s hell instead, for a soul like his—for Gin—he is frayed at the edges and decayed at the core. He just wonders, then, why it seems like the first time he’s been here.

He’s at the point of considering he might be in someone else’s afterlife when there’s a heavy fluttering somewhere in front of him. It’s something gold and he can see it even though there’s no light to see with. Its shape changes as it unfurls, and— _well_. That explains a few things. Gin stands, bends his back in politeness, and keeps his eyes half-shut.

“ _Captain_ ,” he says.

Ohtoribashi Roujuurou takes shape like the bloodstain from a head wound.

He isn’t really gold but cold bone-white with metal round the edges, and his face is the same as it was a hundred years ago. Gin has grown now, is much taller than he was then, but Ohtoribashi is taller still—an inch, probably, and he has muscle and weight that Gin doesn’t. He advances until he’s a forearm-length away and takes up all the space Gin can see.

He is carrying nothing, has no sword, but his edges are sharp. Gin watches him as all his fabrics settle, as he falls into lines laid out long with wire. His haori looks whiter than Gin’s was.

“I have a message for you,” he says, softly, like down-feathers. “From Izuru.”

Gin didn’t know what to expect and still doesn’t. He knows Izuru, he thinks, but he doesn’t know Ohtoribashi. He keeps his hands inside his sleeves and sets his shoulders straight across.

“They having captains send messages for their lieutenants now?” he asks.

Ohtoribashi stays impassive. He looks like he doesn’t care; he probably doesn’t, about Gin. “It was a logistical matter,” he says.

This is starting to make more sense to Gin. “Ah,” he says. “He can’t get here because he’s completely-full-Shinigami-alive.”

“Something like that.”

Ohtoribashi looks like a statue, pale stone spun with gold. If there were shadows they would cover half his face.

Gin looks around again, and still sees nothing that he recognises. “Seems a bit more you than me,” he says.

“I assume my consciousness is stronger than yours,” Ohtoribashi says, with penetrating indifference, “because I’m still alive.”

You could die here, fall and rot, dry up under the roots. Gin is at least satisfied that the Third Division has a suitable captain, even one whose reiatsu is stained with shadows that never belonged.

 “So,” Gin says, pulling his eyes away from Ohtoribashi’s as the reiatsu settles over him like bloodied gauze. “What was it that Izuru said?”

Ohtoribashi’s eyes half-close. “He didn’t tell me, as such,” he says. “He showed me.”

Gin is just getting interested when Ohtoribashi wraps his hands around his throat.

They reach all the way around. Gin can feel a bone in Ohtoribashi’s hand pressing into his pulse and the calluses on the ends of his fingers, scraping in a neat row of eight.

“Thought I was already dead,” Gin says.

Ohtoribashi steps forward, close enough that his jackets skim against Gin’s when he breathes in. His lips are curved into a lazy, half-wrought smile. “You’d be surprised,” he says, mild and mired.

Gin smiles back. His face feels tight.

“Really,” he says.

The black bleeds into Ohtoribashi’s eyes like tar. There are claws underneath it, things that swing and fall and strike, and Gin suddenly has a lot of blood to lose.

Ohtoribashi’s head tilts forward, the expression on his face the same pronounced disinterest it was when he got here. “Death can be subjective,” he says. His voice sounds like he’s speaking through a hole in his throat. “But it does depend on how long you can hold your breath.”

The shadow fits under his skin like some autochthonous thing, grown from the sutures in the skull where the vault seals. Gin thinks if he cut open Ohtoribashi’s bones the marrow would be black.

Ohtoribashi’s grip tightens to resonating pain, pulling the skin tight under Gin’s jawbone. His thumbs are perfectly aligned to Gin’s windpipe. Gin’s pulse thuds against them like beating wings and chars in his cheeks.

Gin wants to use his own hands, but they won’t help him now. Ohtoribashi will break him on the ground and lay his throat open, cut his neck with wire, bleed him from the nail-beds. It will be, Gin knows, for Izuru.

He can almost imagine that Izuru is here, watching from the highest point, fashioning a jail cell where the warder is Despair. It will be made of ivory and dust and the ends of Gin’s fingers. Izuru would blink when you weren’t looking at him.

There’s a roaring in Gin’s ears like he’s falling from the highest tower on the sun. His lips feel like they’re being stuck with pins.

Ohtoribashi’s fingers tighten one by one, left-right-left-right.

The cartilage in Gin’s neck has turned to lead.

He is being crushed under Ohtoribashi’s reiatsu, dragged down by his roots; Ohtoribashi’s body heat is turning him into ash. The eyes are still on him, and somewhere behind them is something that shrieks. They are no different to when they first turned, still bordered with heavy gold and set with splintered claws.

Shinigami are death in formation, fate in a phalanx with Rebirth on their shoulders, and a Hollow is hell. Ohtoribashi has broken one and his fingers have broken the bone above Gin’s voice box. His fingers are made of marble, built on pain-hardened bone.

The last of Gin’s breath dries his mouth and sets him shaking from the neck down. He can’t see to the sides any more, can only see the eyes that drip with shadows and the pallor of a face that was supposed to be dead.

Gin’s body is burning where the nerves end, his fingers flexing useless at his sides. Black seeps through his vision and his tongue tries once, twice — his heart stutters —

Gin wants to say, “Tell Izuru I said _Good luck_ ,” but his throat closes.


End file.
